That's what should have been the biggest news of 2021.
Instead, the story, which broke on November 17, was largely ignored or buried. The nation's two main newspapers, the
Washington Post and the
New York Times, have simply ignored it. Other news organizations stenographically quoted Pentagon officials as admitting that they "failed again" but saw "progress," and as promising that they would achieve a "clean" audit by... get this ... 2027.
The Pentagon, with some $3 trillion (give or take a trillion but who's counting?) in assets and a record current 2021 budget of $738 billion, has for the third year in a row failed its audit. An army of 1400 auditors hired by us taxpayers for $230 million and borrowed from some of the biggest auditing firms in the country, spent the past year poring through the books and visiting hundreds of operations of the government's largest and geographically vastest single agency, and came back with word that they couldn't give it a pass.
They couldn't even figure it out.
Think about that for a minute. The US military, which each year sucks up close to half of the nation's now $1.6-trillion discretionary budget, is a financial black hole! Nobody in the White House Budget Office, the Congressional Armed Services or Budget Committees, the General Accounting Office, or in the Pentagon itself, can say with a straight face how much the Pentagon spends of all the funds it is allocated by Congress each year, where that money gets spent, of even where all the equipment it buys — planes, ammunition, bombs, ships, etc. — are currently.
Comment: Sputnik reports on the Saudi-led retaliation: See also: Pepe Escobar: String of pearls: Yemen could be the Arab hub of the Maritime Silk Road